miércoles, 26 de agosto de 2015

My breathing was really heavy and I almost
couldn’t move after pulling myself out of that lake full of tar or petroleum. I
had no idea what it was and I wasn’t going to find out by staying there. The
people that had dropped me there to kill me had already gone and the night was
very dark in this part of the world. I wasn’t in the city anymore, I was
somewhere where water was very highly contaminated and the birds didn’t even
sing. As I cleaned myself with my hand and some big leaves of a tree, I realized
the substance was very oily so it had to be petroleum.Walking was the worst as I couldn’t move
properly but I made the effort any way because I didn’t want to stay there
through the night. I walked for an hour until I saw some lights and ran towards
them.

The lights became brighter and there were so
many I couldn’t even count them all. They lit a huge factory with chimneys on
top and suddenly I realized that place was the source of all the pollution.
That was the place I had tried to shut down but many people were not at all
interested in that. Money flowed from that factory and all because of the oil
the tankers brought from the sea. I had been there and I had seen the
platforms, horrible places were people that had nothing to lose decided to win
their living. Those were not factories but prisons filled with heavy warmth and
an awful smell. Needless to say, you couldn’t see a bird or any other animal
near those places. Even they knew those places meant death.

Instead of asking for help in the factory, I
went the other way, following the road the trucks used to gain access to it. In
no time, I was in the main road and a nice old lady picked me up. But there was
more to her than what met the eye. I hadn’t called her and I would never use
auto-stop, as the country was too dangerous for that sort of thing. I hopped
into the backseat and we didn’t say a word until she left me in front of my
home, an hour later. I just said “Thank you” and she just nodded. She was
called Delilah and had been my friend for a long while but we never really
spoke about our lives or anything like that. She had saved my life once and
that was enough for us to become friends.

Delilah had been married and had too sons and
a daughter but they lived far away and she didn’t really care about them coming
into her life again. She had raised them well, done her job and that’s all she
was interested in. When I went up to my apartment, I wasn’t very shocked to see
that every single object in my home was on the floor. Broken, torn apart or just
laying there, all my life was on the floor. They had come here, maybe as they
drugged me and dumped me in that thick lake, and destroyed everything. My
backup files, all stores in hard drives, had been stolen and my computer was
just a bunch of metal on my desk. But I had more backups so I didn’t really
care about the state of things.

I went through my ripped clothes and destroyed
drawers. I grabbed some things that no one would care to take away like my
mother’s wedding ring or my parent’s picture I kept in a book. They were my
link to them because I wasn’t the type of person that was into graveyards or
however you want to call them. I just liked to talk to their picture and tell
them what I was up to then. I had always been the rebellious kind of kid and I
knew they would be so worried about me. My mother would asked me if I had a way
to clean myself and brush my teeth and my dad would remind me to check my body
for bruises in the shower. Somehow, he said, the body bumps into things and you
never realize it until it’s too late.

They were the only two people in the world I
cared about. They had died years before and now I was all alone, fighting
against something that was bigger than me and that any other human being. I was
trying to bring a corporation down and, although I had some friends like
Delilah, none would be so much into this cause as I was. I had invested my life
in investigating; taking advantage of my position in society to bring everyone
involved in this down and now my life had an expiration date. What I couldn’t
understand was why they had dropped me in that pond and not shot me or
something. Were they cowards or was that their style? I don’t know and,
honestly, I have no idea if I want to know.

Proof. That’s what, supposedly, justice wants
from me in order to apprehend the people that have cause so much misery and
despair around the world. Because this city is just a piece of the whole
puzzle. I have traveled the world and seen children drown in similar ponds to
the one they wanted to use to kill me. Huge factories built just next to all
the little and rattled houses that people have built with their effort and
suffering. There’s nothing quite like misery because it’s brutal and forces you
into the real world. It makes you see how more than half of the world lives
their lives and that has the capacity to shock anyone that has feelings or even
just a pair of good old eyes.

I was the kind of person you would find in
high society events, whether they happened in a club or in a yacht, in the
Riviera or a penthouse in Paris. I was always there and I had been educated to
know what to do, how to talk and who to be “friends” with. Because even then, I
was friends with no one. My family knew that I hated all of it but that I did
it for them because they were all too important in society. Every man and woman
wanted to have my attention because they knew who I was. But they weren’t
interested in knowing anything more than the amount of money I could give them
or what I could show off to them. It was very pathetic.

It was the day my parents died when I knew how
vicious that society I had been feeding could be. The day of their burial, no
one was there but me and a couple of people that were too afraid the ghosts of
my parents would pull their legs as they slept. Cowards. They never moved a
finger when I was being dragged through the mud, laughed at for everything I
did to help people that had no way of helping themselves. None of those high
and mighty people had any heart or soul. They only cared about profit and
making their wallets and bank account even more filled with money. They cut
every single link to my parents company and I had to save what I could before
they tore it apart completely. My parents weren’t being stupid: they had left
me enough for me to keep on living in peace for many years.

I moved fro my former neighborhood, which
helped me exterminate many bad feelings I had for all those people. I didn’t
want to hate them so I just disappeared from their lives and asked them to
disappear from mine. They heard me, at least that time, and I have to say I
lived a very good year after that. I was teaching and I was helping the people
I had met so many years before. But nothing can be as perfect forever. Life has
a way to even out and that’s exactly what happened. I discovered the
contamination of several national parks both in the sea and the land as well as
contracts between oil companies and banks in order to make the economic system
fall to their feet. That wasn’t a difficult thing to do.

This world, after all, is not built on solid
ground. Our society was built by greedy men that only thought of their profit
in that moment of time but had no interest, or very little, in the future.
People were not aware of how easy it was to influence the stock market in order
to benefit a certain country or a certain type of company. I have to confess
that when I discovered it all, I felt sick to my stomach and I felt guilty
because I was part of the problem. I was the kind of person that complains but never
does anything. I was the kind of person that things their ideas should be
implemented and then I would go and have cocktails with my friends.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t have fun. I
only think we should all be more aware of what happens around us. How people in
power use us to get there and never recall what the promises that were made
were all about. Politicians are rotten because the whole system is in decay. I
thought this to my students: the economic and political system of our western
society cannot last for a thousand years. In one moment, everything will
stumble because that’s what nature does. It has to keep changing in order to
stay alive and nowadays, nature is slowly dying and we cannot do anything
anymore. It’s too late for the world and now we have to pay the consequences of
our ignorance.

I help because I need to. Because I still feel
guilty. Because I don’t have anything else to do. When I went back home, I put
everything that hadn’t been torned apart into a suitcase. I grabbed it all and
left for the place where I hid part of my archives. Those were not all but I
didn’t need them all, not all the copies. I needed even more copies until the
world decided to wake up and listen to what the planet had to say. After I
picked up the information, Delilah came for me and took me to a city four hours
away. It was the first time we actually chatted. And it felt good.

lunes, 24 de agosto de 2015

Linda Fox loved to imagine what had happened
in the places she cleaned up in the mornings. She usually did ball rooms and
other big places but sometimes even big country houses or big rooms in huge
apartments. She had learned pretty soon that some people have too much money
and also too much time on their hands. She was never there once the music was
playing or the guests were arriving but she could picture everything with only
cleaning the places. She had learned through her senses the differences between
an expensive wine and a cheap wine and between a good perfume and a bad one. Of
course, she was no definitive professional on the matter but she felt she kind
of knew the people that had been there by only staying in a room for a while.

She had stumbled into that job after looking
for many months. She had been laid off as a secretary on a big firm and, since
then, no one would hire her. Linda knew this was because of her age. Not many
companies wanted to hire women over forty and she was really lucky to have
found that cleaning job. At least she didn’t have to do it on the street or
every single day in a house where they would probably not even look at her. In
this job, she was called two or three times a week, never more than that and it
would always be to clean up places were the rich and famous went. No frat
parties or middle class parties with alcohol all over the floor. No, this
people were the elite but the elite had no idea how to clean a place up and
that’s when they came in.

Linda would come in with two other women, also
aged over forty. And they would just start to clean up: first they would pick
up the garbage from the floor, they would put away tables, cutlery and other
things might slow down the mopping of the floors. Depending on the surface,
they would clean it again with products that left everything smelling just
perfect. Normally, they would spend at least three hours there. The three women
were very thorough and checked every corner until the venue was even cleaner
than before the party or event had taken place. No one would congratulate or
anything after that. Their boss would pay them cash and that was it.

It wasn’t the best job in the world but Linda
knew it was the only job she could have gotten at her age. And even young
people had trouble getting work so she had to be grateful. Besides, it paid
well to service all those rich people. She never saw one of them but she knew
they would pay through the nose just for someone to do something they would
never do. When cleaning. Linda always loved to imagine she was one of the
guests. Of course none of them would have to pick up the trash or mop the
floors but her imagination was not going to limit itself because of that. The
other women, she knew, did the same thing. After all, they knew they would
never have something like that.

One day, when cleaning a beautiful room in a
country house about an hour away from the city, Linda found something very
special. It was a ring and it had fell beneath the floorboards. She could see
it there, shining beneath her feet as she picked up several papers and plastic
plates. She looked at the other too, who were cleaning other points of the
room, and tried to imagine a way to get the ring out. There was a small whole
on one of the boards and she supposed the small object had fallen through
there. She looked around to see if someone was looking at her and then pulled
the small board, which was loose. She saw the beautiful shine of the ring and
then took it. She looked at it as she had been hypnotized by it.

It had a big diamond surrounded by smaller
emeralds and rubies. They were all there; none had fallen to the ground when
whoever had been wearing it had dropped it. One of the women asked Linda for
the mop, and she almost dropped the ring to her surprise. She put it fast in
her pants pocket and then behaved as normally as she could. Linda didn’t know
why she had done that. She had found several other things in the past and had
always given them to her boss in order for him to find its true owners. But this
time, she wanted the ring for herself. She didn’t really know why, as he had no
real chance to wear that ring anywhere and anyone that had any idea about her
would know that she didn’t have the money to buy such a beautiful piece of
jewelry.

When work was over, the company sent a car to
take them back to the city and she felt the trip lasted several hours but it
was only one. She was the first one to exit the car when they arrived and to
leave the place as soon as possible. Her work mates didn’t really think that
was strange because she had always been like that, a little too private. They
actually thought she was too good to even talk to them, or at least she thought
that was the case. And both women had decided that they didn’t care about what
she did. After all, they paid them when they all showed up for work and id what
they had to do. That was it. They didn’t need more than that.

Linda almost ran home. Once she was inside,
she locked the door and closed her bedroom door behind her. She decided to change
clothes first and then she would take the ring from her coat and watch it in
all its glory. It was not as beautiful now as it had been before with the
beautiful sunlight, but it was obvious the piece had an immense value, at least
economically speaking. Linda then wondered who would drop such a beautiful ring
to the ground and wouldn’t even mind to pick it up? Had it fallen from the
finger of a very distracted or drunk woman? It was kind of fun to imagine all
the stories behind the ring, as if it was a big adventure that she could
imagining easily.

She felt asleep wearing the ring and, at any
moment, felt the urge to return it to the house where she had been cleaning or
to her boss. The next day, she chose to take it to a professional jeweler to
ask him how much he thought that ring was worth. He lied by telling him that
she had just inherited from a dying aunt. The men checked it with various
instruments for some time but finally stated that all the pieces were very high
quality: the diamond was very clean and pure, probably African. The rubies and
emeralds, although smaller, were also of a very high quality. Even the ring as
such was made from very light titanium, which wasn’t used very frequently on
rings. Linda left as soon as she knew more and also because she realized the
man didn’t believe the story of her old aunt.

Beside, she told her something she had not
seen before. Inside the ring there was an inscription. It was a full name: John
William Hammond. The men looked at Linda as if he wanted to know who that
person was but she just lied again and said it was her aunt’s husband. Then she
took the ring, gave the man some bills and left in haste. She returned home and
looked at the inscription closer. It had to be looked in a certain way but there
it was. The name of a man in woman’s ring. So maybe this was a ring someone had
used to propose marriage. Linda couldn’t believe how romantic her story turned
out to be.

She decided to find out about every detail she
could about the owners of the house she had cleaned that day. Apparently the
family that owned it also owned several vineyards and other types of crops and
plantations around the country. But their most well known product was wine. She
also found out that the eldest daughter had recently married to a man that
owned half of the biggest retail company in the city. She found a gossip
magazine with every picture of the vent. Surprisingly, it had taken place very
recently, only a couple of days after she had cleaned up the country house and
found the ring. Then, she looked for the name that was inscribed in the ring
but that proved to be a bit harder. She had to go through various gossip pages
on the Internet to finally find the name.

Once she did, however, she gasped. John
William Hammond was not who she thought it was going to be. Linda was already
making him a banker or a renowned tennis player or even a movie actor. But no.
John William Hammond was nothing more than junior lawyer in a firm that had
helped of the vineyards through a rough time. Apparently, it was his team that
had stopped a very large company from securing that particular vineyard.
Apparently there was a huge problem with the land. But the man was just a
lawyer and they only mentioned him in one article of an economic journal.

His name was on a ring and then, again, Linda
invented a wonderful story about him been an underdog in love with the lady of
society. She thought that maybe they had had an affair but she had finally
effused him in favor of an even better position and money. She had been the one
that had chosen the easier road. Linda slept thinking of them without ever
finding out the truth, which was a lot sadder but more real. But sometimes
reality is not as important as the realities we can invent with it, even more
when things have already happened and no one can change them.

miércoles, 31 de diciembre de 2014

All the guests and hosts in the Queen Victoria sat down to eat, just past sunset. The yacht was so big it had a decent sized dining room, enough for all twelve guests. As people sat down, they greeted Johann Ronson, the owner and part-time captain of the vessel. He was the magnate that had bought the boat and had invited his closest friends to wander the Egean Sea with him for a week.

The main course, served after a shrimp cocktail and a couple of glasses of champagne, was king crab. It was fresh and only served with a butter sauce and a special fork to eat it. Everyone enjoyed thoroughly. A lot of crab, of wine and champagne and a lot of conversation. Even millionaires would start talking a little bit too much after such a meal.

It was a certain English lady that spilled the fact that her husband had made many stupid investments over the years and now they had absolutely nothing. Those who weren’t as drunk as her had heard it perfectly and had made a mental note never to deal with the woman or her family again.

Late at night, everyone went to bed. They were all full and tired. Only the captain stayed behind in the dining room, drinking and coursing the day he had bought the boat. The reality was that he needed somewhere to go, to escape from all the responsibilities he had with his family and numerous investors in his company. He felt so much money didn’t gave him as much privilege as he would have wanted.

He felt asleep right there and, for a good time, the ship was silent, anchored near a rock formation were a large amount of seagulls nested. It wasn’t until the next day, early, when a scream woke everyone up.

It came from one of the rooms in the stern. As people got near, they could distinguish that the voice that screamed was the one of a woman. Actually, everyone knew who was screaming. They found her on the bed, looking at her side. The scene was simply too much for anyone.

The lady that had no inheritance finally fainted, just besides her husband who was covered in blood from legs to neck, where he had been cut with a knife or something.

A couple of woman, helped by the staff of the boat, took Lady Emerson, the now poor and widowed woman, out of the room and into another one, until she woke up. When she did, she looked as if she had lost her mind, babbling nonsense and trembling uncontrollably.
The men passengers check Lord Emerson’s body, as the crew had been ordered by the captain to call the police but not to move the boat from its current location. He told them that if a crime, and that seemed to be the case, had been committed on board, they should call the police and wait right there to avoid the killer to escape.

But what was done had no way to be undone. They covered the body with a large blanket and waited for the police, who had been called on the radio. Lunch was served, as normal, but no one was really in the mood for sea bass. A dead body was only rooms away and it may prove insensitive to eat, as a murder had been committed.

The police finally arrived late in the afternoon. They had sent a translator with them and the inspector that had been sent with them was half American, so he had a way to talk to everyone in the boat.

The first thing they did was to get the body out of the yacht, as the smell was beginning to take a toll on the people in the nearest rooms. A young girl had already vomited profusely overboard, leaving the Greek waters a little bit more polluted than they were before.

The room were the crime was committing was closed and checked thoroughly all night. When it got too late, two officers were left there to protect the place from been contaminated. Before leaving, the inspector said he was sure he would find the murderer as he or she was still on the boat.

When he said that, everyone realized it was true. It was silly, but everyone had treated the murder as a natural death or something of sorts. But no, Lord Emerson had been killed when one of the passengers had slit his throat from behind, assuring he would not yell and no one would hear anything.

At breakfast, the next day, the Captain had to order the kitchen staff to serve everyone in their rooms, which was exceptionally annoying as breakfast was a buffet. So now, they had to go room by room to ask what people wanted and then bring it to them. In the kitchens there was also the discussion: “What if were serving the murderer”? To answer that, a boy who cleaned the bathroom only said “We’re all working for a killer right now”. Everyone laughed but it was certainly not funny.

The police came back during breakfast to commence the sweeping of the place of the crime and they found the sheets full of blood, the seal of a bottle of wine that had slipped beneath the bed and a stain near the back side of the bed, where there was a window.

When they finished, the captain was told his ship would be escorted back to Rhodes, where they had the equipment to do a full search on the yacht. Mr. Ronson was sad and even depressed but he had to accept if he wanted all of it to end soon. So by sunset, they were already in the island. To ensure the investigation, they were all put under “house arrest” in a hotel by the police station.

All the passengers were rich and had more interesting things to do than waiting for a murder investigation to finish. They had only reserved a week to travel to Greece to spend some time with old Ronson, because he was wealthier than any of them could ever be. If they ever ran into financial distress, it would be him who could be able to save them from it.

Ronson was known worldwide because of helping people that needed him: saving companies from bankruptcy, hiring the best lawyers, paying mortgages… The man was the savior of the rich, or so he was called in many economic magazines that praised and despised him, all at the same time.

The police told Mr. Ronson, that his boat was not going to be dismantled as the crime didn’t seemed planed or that structured but that they did need to search every single inch of it, as the be sure of what the investigation was pointing to.

So all the crew and passengers had to spend one more week in Rhodes, trapped in a fancy hotel, waiting for the results of the probe. The crew was especially happy as they didn’t have to work any more and they were the ones being treated to beautiful restaurants, an elegant swimming pool and all the drinks they could handle.

The wealthier guests almost always remained in their room, already trying to book flights or boats out of the damn island for the day they had been promised to be released. To be honest, they were looking forward more holidays and sunny locations, but away from all the fuss and annoying aspect of a murder.

The truth was none of them really cared about someone being killed just doors away from their rooms. They didn’t mind at all. What made them grind their gears, was the fact they couldn’t keep behaving as they always did and as what they were: rich spoiled brats who needed to be able to do whatever they wanted, even if they had no intention of doing anything.

Happily for them, not as much for the members of the crew, the boat was released on the promised date. However, they were all summoned to be present in the press conference were the murderer would be announced, as the evidence against that person was irrefutable.

The police babbled even more than most of the rich passenger of the yacht but, when it finally got to it, it was revealed Lady Emerson had been found guilty of the crime.

According to the police, it was found that only her could have been able to enter the room and kill him, as there were no traces of anyone else doing so, not the day of the murder or before. The stain found by the bed, was left there by Lady Emerson, as she opened the window to throw the murder weapon to the ocean. Of course, the weapon was nowhere to be found.

As for the seal of the bottle of wine, the police claimed they had found the bottle on a trashcan on the kitchens. Apparently, Lady Emerson had gotten her husband drunk before killing him with a knife and then, she went insane because of what she had done.

The inspector announced Lady Emerson would pay for her crime in the Attica prison for women, near Athens, and that she would do so in the psychiatric ward of the prison, for the next twenty years. He declared they had gotten a psychiatrist to run some tests to her, all of which certified she was beyond insane, losing all grasp of reality.

The yacht went back to the sea, with only Mr. Ronson inside and a few crewmen. The rest of the passengers left for Athens or London, or other destinations in the Mediterranean.

The actual murder? He left for Cyprus and then for Israel. As it happened, an old lover of Lady Emerson had been the real killer. She thought he had married another woman to spite her but he had married her to get close to her and to his husband, who he hated for having put her through so many bad times. So he killed her with a knife and she went mad when she woke up to see his lover, arms covered in plastic, killing her husband.

Lady Emerson died, insane and in pain, in the Attica prison. She had no children or real family. Her former lover lived in Eilat for several years, until one of the many wars in the region, in which he died.